


In the Bleak Mid-Winter

by anoyo



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-08
Updated: 2008-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:45:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/anoyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>Spoilers</b>, season one.  Tieria celebrates Christmas by remembering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Bleak Mid-Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it's a Christmas fic. No, I'm not insane. Well, uh, the two aren't necessarily related, anyway. An introspective post-25 Christmas piece. Yeah. Spoilers for all of season one (episodes 1-25).

A Gundam 00 Christmas Fic  
In May  
So Help Me

Celestial Being was, for the moment, "temporarily disbanded."

That is to say, they were licking their wounds.

One Gundam Meister dead, two more-than-seriously injured, and one righteously, well, righteous. At least all was right somewhere in the world.

However, the two injured Meisters were, like their births entailed, and their living proved, slightly more than human. Their recovery time did not warrant the size of the break the organization had decided to take in its "armed interventions." Their recovery time did not warrant a year and a half and counting.

Tieria had been back on his feet for nearly a year, and completely well for at least eight months. He was, to put it mildly, bored out of his mind. All his life, he'd had Veda, and Veda's commands for Celestial Being, and preparations to make, and things to scheme, and people to find inadequate. Whether they simply no longer found him useful or they were honestly concerned for his health, the "higher-ups" of Celestial Being had insisted that he take this time to recuperate. He was not even permitted to help with the reconstruction of Veda.

At first, he'd tried to be useful, keeping himself around the base and the rebuilding site of Ptolemy. Eventually, he'd realized that being pushed aside was, in fact, worse than sitting around and doing nothing at all. He wasn't built to do nothing, but he was certainly not built to be ordered around like a foot soldier. Or an invalid. It was insulting.

So, eventually, when he could no longer take just watching the others work, he took a shuttle to earth, rented an apartment, and got himself a library card. It was in no way "sticking it to the man," but it was as close as he'd ever get.

He read book after book after book, working his way through non-fiction, histories, philosophical discourses, and, finally, fiction. Whenever he'd come across fiction during the "First War," as he was calling it, he'd scoffed and commented, "Why live vicariously though someone else? That's pointless. Work on making your own deeds something memorable. Be worthy of this," or something to that regard, with varying degrees of condescension or scoff.

He'd discovered that stagnancy changes a man. When he ran out of non-fiction, and had counted the trees in the park exactly eighteen times, he caved in and started reading fiction.

Once he did, he realized something strange: one could, in fact, learn from fiction. Novels could teach one things that non-fiction couldn't in their footnoted verboseness. Things about people, things about cultures, things about nature. Things Tieria hadn't expected to find; hadn't known to look for.

He'd once asked what made someone, or something, human. And maybe, just maybe, it was those things. Those unquantifiable things, like trust, and hope, and the comfort that comes from lying, quietly, comfortably, in the company of another soul.

It was in fiction, too, that he first heard of "Christmas."

"Christmas," a million and a half books said, was part of some religion. You set up a fir tree, decorated it, and exchanged gifts with your loved ones. Gifts wrapped in shiny paper.

It seemed absurd.

But, lo-and-behold, that first December on earth, he watched fir trees go up, tinsel get strewn everywhere, and people begin talking about what they were doing for Christmas, what they wanted for Christmas, their "big Christmas plans." Apparently Christmas wasn't just in books. This did not explain it's purpose, nor did it explain why Tieria had never heard of it before, though he was able to assume the latter was because he really had no need to know about it. Which was, well, true.

Through some minor inquiry, he discovered Christmas was a Christian thing. A Catholic thing. A Western thing that had become universal. Along the way, the actual meaning of Christmas had been lost, but the apparently excitement over it, and feelings for it, had remained unchanged.

That first Christmas, Tieria simply watched the festivities unfold around him. His neighbors offered him cookies, told him the best places to buy a real fir tree, and asked him to watch their cat while they went home for the holidays. The advice Tieria took in stride. The cat he was a bit baffled by. When, January second, his neighbors returned, he found himself bizarrely sad to part with the hissing monstrosity.

When it had kittens in April, he kept one. He'd probably always have that scar on his shin from his discovery of the kitten's adoration of ankles.

Now, however, his second Christmas, Tieria had found himself drawn into the spirit of things. His neighbors instructed him on how to hang ornaments so his now-cat wouldn't knock them off the tree -- to no avail, it seemed -- and he purchased a tree, decorations, and shiny paper aplenty. Gifts for your loved ones, the season perpetuated. That's what the shiny paper was for.

Tieria didn't have "loved ones," not like the season called for. There were those in his esteem, and those worthy of being his comrades, but none that he "loved," as the fiction described, painstakingly, over and over.

"Love" seemed to be tied to a certain longing, a certain happiness, all threaded through with the strong metal wire of heartache. Tieria was not familiar with these three concepts; they were not his status quo.

But, over and over again, when he found them portrayed in the fiction, they seemed to ring a bell in him. And the bell would chime, perhaps, "I think I've felt that," at one particular scene, and "I know how that feels," at another, without allowing Tieria in on its perfect little secret.

The Christmas stories Tieria read seemed to possess the most heartache of the lot, even including those stories describing epic battles fought and lives lost, lovers killed. The happiness of the season seemed to underscore, emphatically, whatever heartache there was in the person. Whatever pain they were feeling was thrown into stark relief upon that backdrop of happy contentment associated with Christmas.

In the books, that concept just seemed strange. They usually got the guy (or girl) and were able to celebrate Christmas happily and full of love. And that love was all the more exceptional for the season and the heartache that came before it. It was a bizarre discrepancy: why should one day be any different than any other simply because of its date and the name attached to that date? It was simply a mental construct.

But his second Christmas, Tieria could feel the change happening in the atmosphere. An almost palpable thickening of feelings, actions, and reactions.

It almost felt like that day, once a year, when the air was full of sorrow, and remembrance, and self-loathing. Only, instead of the negative emotions, there were pure, uplifting, and joyous emotions. But the idea was the same: somehow, a day, just for its past or meaning or implications, could be different. The sun didn't shine any differently, the air was still the same, but there was a difference. A real difference.

When he made that connection, Tieria stopped disbelieving. A day could be different, even it was merely a mentally constructed difference. Christmas could be different, almost nauseatingly happy and hopeful, but still achingly remnant of the feelings of that day.

It wasn't until his new desk clerk wished him a, "Happy Yule, Mr. Cameron," that he realized that the tangible emotions weren't all that was familiar about Christmas.

He turned on the poor clerk, then, and asked, "Yule? What's Yule?"

The clerk blinked, somewhat stupefied, and certainly confused, and answered, "It's the pagan holiday that was originally the week that we now celebrate Christmas. It's actually why Christmas is when it is."

Tieria's brows furrowed. "So it's just another name for Christmas?"

"If you're not Christian, yeah, sure. They're basically the same thing," the clerk answered, giving him a funny look.

Tieria pursed his lips, brow still furrowed, and said, "Thank you," before walking out of the building, for his original errand.

He'd heard "Yule" before. In his life, he'd been in innumerable places. Really, though, he'd only really been a handful of them. And "Yule" had been in the past. It had to have been in one of those places that he'd heard it.

He was in the park on his way home when the memory finally dredged itself up, his soft pea coat collecting slowly falling snowflakes. For having been so thoroughly hidden, the memory was shockingly real, disturbingly real, almost then-and-now.

Sight, sound, scent, touch, taste -- they were all recorded in full detail.

_. . . a warm arm, sliding around his waist from behind, startling him where he was standing, leafing through comparative statistics of Virtue's outputs . . ._

_. . . a solid chest pressed against his back, soft breath cascading down from his left temple, over the contours of his face . . . _

_. . . a muttered, "Happy Yule," felt more than heard, with it a warm, peppermint-scented kiss placed scratchily against his forehead . . . _

Tieria's breath snagged itself on the memory, and a handily present, damp bench provided him with a place to delicately collapse, hand to throat.

_. . . the way his own body stiffened when the touch first presented itself, then relaxed again, seemingly against his own will, warm and safe -- safe? he was always and never safe, surely not -- and contented without his approval . . . _

_. . . the smile sneaking its way across his face, tugging at the corners of his mouth and eyes, instructing his eyes to drift shut slowly . . . _

_. . . the hand that crept its way into his pants pocket slowly, leaving a small box there when it just as fluidly crept back out . . . _

_. . . "Open that later, hey?" being spoken against his forehead . . . _

_. . . an added weight against his shoulders as the form behind him bent slowly to press another scratchy kiss to the side of his neck . . . _

_. . . the small exhalation -- not a gasp, not a breath -- he let out as the arm around his waist snaked away again, and before he could recover himself, the warm body was removed altogether from the room . . . _

Tieria clenched his eyes shut, wishing the memory back into its box, wishing he'd never tried to find it.

_. . . the small porcelain cat the box opened to reveal when his curiosity got the better of him later that night . . . _

_. . . his confusion over the purpose of the gift . . . _

_. . . his awkward "thank you" nonetheless . . . _

Maybe this wasn't Tieria's second Christmas. Maybe it was his third. Or maybe it was his third "Yule," but his second "Christmas." Something like that. Something quantifiable.

Steadying himself, locking the memory back up, Tieria stood shakily, and changed the direction of his walking. East through the park instead of South, and he clenched his hands in his pockets, a nervous gesture he didn't normally allow himself.

He reached his destination after a remarkably short walk, it being, in a sense, connected to the park he'd been walking in.

Standing awkwardly, he drew out his still-clenched right hand, and unfolded it, eyes almost unseeing.

The small black faux-velvet box was worn, but intact, and served its purpose admirably. Opening it slowly, he drew out a black porcelain cat, set with small amethysts for eyes.

He knelt, and set the porcelain cat on the small piece of marble before him, set into the ground. There was no shiny paper.

That wasn't the thing most wrong.

"Happy Yule," he said quietly.

He stayed several moments longer, but eventually straightened, brushed off the front of his coat, and headed back into the park.

"Happy Yule."


End file.
